Toto

Maybe it was the first few pages, but the attempt to link Paul to the modern himan rights movement in South Africa, and his opponents to segregationists and racial separatists, just seemed like rhetorical overkill. And it reminded me of the question, if there are so many good values in Christianity, why is the history of Christianity so full of the opposite values? At what point do you decide that Christianity is not a useful guide to the good life, based on its track record? But that's another topic.

Steven Carr wants to know why Paul claims not to derive his authority from any mere man, but from the risen Jesus Christ, and does this imply that he thought Jesus was not a human being? Or just beyond and above the human phase when he appeared to Paul?

I notice that modern Christians on this forum don't like to talk about revelation as a source of the gospels, but it seems clear that Paul is ascribing his authority to divine revelation, if Paul in fact wrote this.

Steven Carr

I don't think Wright wrote Galatians. I thought it was Paul who claimed that he didn't get any revelation from a human being - he got it from Jesus.

I used to live in Durham, so Wright's name came up very often in local news.....

'The God Delusion' was written for the general masses.

Remind me why that makes everything in it totally immune from being analyzed to see if it makes sense.

Toto

Of course it doesn't make sense. It's not supposed to. It's emotionally manipulative propaganda. Both Paul's Galatians and "Tom" Wright's explanation of it.

Paul didn't think Jesus was human. Neither did Eusebius, when he added that comment to Josephus: "Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, ..."

That's why I challenged GDon about referring to early Christians as historicists. Their Jesus was a god, not a mere human.

Doug Shaver

That has been debated numerous times in this forum. Rather than plow that field again, I'll just note that I infer Paul's thinking from the entirety of his corpus together with all the other Christian writings of the first and early second century rather than from just what a handful of isolated proof texts might suggest.

Doug Shaver

Obviously, he was attributing a human essence of some sort to Jesus, but no, I don't believe he was affirming that Jesus was a human being in the ordinary sense of that term.

Solo

Well, thanks, gg....jaundiced view ? probably relates another of those mysteries from my childhood. I was 8 and hospitalized with Hep A. I could never figure out why God gave me that particular stupid disease either, and during the summer vacation, imagine that ! But I am a patsy, basically, I have no grudges.

Jiri

Ben C Smith

You wrote that Paul was writing about Jesus in Galatians 1.1 as if it never would have occurred to his readers that he could have been talking about a human being. Yet it has occurred to Paul himself to call Jesus a man in 1 Corinthians 15.21, 47. IOW, the only reason you have in Galatians 1.1 for thinking that Paul was not thinking of Jesus as a man is that he seems to speak of men and of Jesus as belonging to separate categories (not men, but Jesus). Yet in 1 Corinthians 15.21 he speaks of Jesus as a man (that is, he uses the same word of Jesus he seems to be denying to Jesus in Galatians 1.1). I know how I resolve this apparent contradiction. How do you resolve this apparent contradiction?

Ben.

Toto

I suspect that there were different interpolators at work in Corinthians and Galatians. How do you resolve this?

Doug Shaver

By assuming that the word anthropos had various meanings in various contexts, notwithstanding that the same entity is being referenced in those contexts.

Ben C Smith

1 Corinthians 15.21: Jesus was a man who was resurrected from the dead.

1 Corinthians 15.47: In his resurrected state he is no longer (merely) a man; he is the second man (prototype of a new kind of resurrected humanity).

Galatians 1.1: No (ordinary) man made Paul an apostle. Rather, it was Jesus (who was once a man but no longer is per se) and God (who never was in the first place). Galatians 1.16 fills out what Paul means by the unqualified term man; he means the kind that has flesh and blood. Contrast 1 Corinthians 15.50; the second man does not have flesh and blood.

Ben.